emotionalism

Emotional Differences

The following was from a reader’s comment exchange I had back in March. I wanted to add this here before I move on to the Rational process, because it think it encapsulates a lot of the (often misguided) presumptions we have when it comes to the primary importance we apply to our Emotional process. As I mentioned last week, for millennia now we’ve elevated our Emotional process of interpreting our reality to mythical importance. So insaturated is this importance in our personal and cultural being that to even question it seems sacrilegious. We are literally born into a dependence on emotions for our own survival. That is part of our earliest development, but the conditioning that gives rise to the primacy of emotionalism is layered onto us for the rest of our lives. Emotionalism is the religion that we’ve fashioned from our Emotional interpretive process.
Women practice emotional manipulation and men practice emotional detachment. It’s been a game playing out for thousands of years. Somehow the roles got scrambled in the last century. Things will balance out one way or another in the coming future.

What’s been popularized in our social consciousness as ‘emotional detachment‘ is not a manipulation tactic of men. Men’s mental firmware processes emotion differently from women, but because we live in a feminine-primary social order we’re conditioned to believe that the way women process emotion is the “correct” way for men to process them as well. I made the point a little while ago in another essay that what we think is men’s incorrect way of communicating with other men is really men’s natural way of communicating. I’d linked to an article in the Boston Globe about the problem of “lonely middle aged men” and how they don’t do communication and friendship like women do. Men’s natural, general, indifference to their emotional state isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our mental firmware.

This isn’t to say men don’t get lonely or share the same emotional states as women, but it is to say that men do emotions differently than women. We are naturally predisposed to prioritize information above emotion; the Instinctual and Rational processes come before emotion in our interpretive process. I can remember early on in my marriage when I would talk to a buddy of mine on the phone and then abruptly just say “see ya” or hang up. He knew I’d call him back to relay whatever info we were discussing sooner or later, but my wife thought something was wrong. “Is everything OK with Ray?” she’d ask, and I said “Yeah, why wouldn’t it?” She explained that she thought my ending the call like that was rude or that we’d had an argument. She was used to long drawn conversations with girlfriends or her sister and then ending them by some confessions of how much they would miss each other or some other meaningful way.

She thought my way of communicating was wrong, but this is how men interact with each other – say what you mean, mean what you say and get to the point. This was also the presupposition of the Boston Globe article and many other posts; men do communication wrong, men do emotion wrong, and therefore they must be conditioned to do them correctly. That is to say, like women do.

Men lack the hardware and the firmware to do this, but they are conditioned to reflexively respond as women do from the earliest age. Thus, when a man processes emotion naturally it appears he’s not “feeling” correctly or isn’t “emotionally available” to female-correct sensibilities. In this context a man doing emotion as his innate predispositions compel him to seems like he’s deliberately playing out some ’emotional detachment’ game. But rather than accept that men and women are different and deal with emotions in different ways our egalitarian Blue Pill conditioning makes us presume the man is being inauthentic.

“He’s not really that way, it’s an act, or he’s just withholding his emotions to hurt a woman.” This is the rationale that female-correct society has to resort to because accepting that men evolved to process emotions differently would also mean that men and women are not the functional “equals” that blank-slate equalism is founded on. Thus, their emphasis is to pathologize this emotional detachment and make it one more negative aspect of maleness in need of a ‘cure’.

I think your comments are pertinent and you brought good rational arguments. However they are along the lines of “that’s how we are, men and women”, that’s how we evolved and we can’t do anything about it because it’s in our DNA and our mental programming. Feminism is marching on the fact that we’re born equal, even if there are obvious biological differences. Yes, women emote more and have the means to be greater emotional manipulators. But men can learn the so called feminine behaviors (The so called Game actually involves this and I noticed some of the PUAs mentioning that it’s the bisexual men who are actually the greatest players) and women can also learn the so called manly behaviors (there are a lot of examples especially in our current society). Is it good, is it bad? Hard to say. The thing is that the family is an artificial construction that helped our civilization flourish and it’s been lately systematically destroyed due to what you’re calling feminine primary social order.

Evolution is a continuous process and my opinion is that it’s either people will somehow transcend their biology (see AI or some kind of other conscious evolution) or after some “dark” times of men being more like women and women more like men the things will come to the previous “normality” of feminine women and manly men.

Human beings will not transcend their own evolution, they will adapt with their environments, but they will not be removed from its influences. We’ve been force fitting and conditioning men to be women for the past five generation. We presume that the feminine is the correct, unitary way that humans should be. We call that egalitarian equality, but what it comes down to is adopting a universal correct mode of being and it’s founded on feminine/female control of what is right and wrong – at least for the time being.

However, this force-fits boys and men into an unnatural state they never evolved for and all because the feminine is the presumed correct gender norm that we base equality on. We’re all expected to be equally female. What has that got us in those past five generations? A male suicide rate five times that of women. Boys prescribed sedatives for acting like boys instead of ‘correct’ girls. I can go on.

The fact remains that you and many others of your mindset believe that evolving or being in control of that process only progresses if boys and men “transcend” their biology and think like correct females. It is the height of new agey metaphysical woo woo hubris to expect one sex to behave counter to its 100,000 years of evolved nature and become like the other to accommodate what it thinks should be correct. This is the crux here; the feminine-primary social order we live in today is predicated on the infallibility of the female experience, however, this experience is only validated if both men and women are prioritizing women’s Emotional process as a way of interpreting the world.

State Control

Reader, constrainedlocus had an interesting thought in the Anger Bias essay comment thread:

“The point is that a feminine-primary social order readily makes this nature a useful tool in dismissing what would otherwise be valid, but uncomfortable Red Pill truth. This anger bias mechanism is a tool for message control.”

What I find interesting is that, from my own personal observations of men in both marriage and long-term relationships, is that this dismissal happens readily and frequently at the micro level in sexual relationships as well. It’s impossible for men not to notice the hypocrisy.

A man need not experience the trivialization of his anger from “the sisterhood” response in the media, in the corporate setting, or even while at a party with other couples.

I think it now common for a wife or long-term girlfriend to assume a certain privilege or “authority” to express and direct her own anger, indignation and outrage rather freely and loudly – whenever she wishes – toward her male companion, without much consequence.

But should her male companion ever lose his composure, raise his voice in anger toward here, then this is either considered “verbal abuse”, an uncalled for overreaction, or his complaint is simply trivialized, ridiculed or disqualified by her, much like she would belittle the tantrum of her own young child.

Who has not witnessed wives scold their husbands in public at a restaurant or at a park like little children for his getting angry at her attitude or behavior? “Don’t you EVER raise your voice at me, mister!”.

I realize this is all about a man’s frame in the relationship.
I know that it is a weak man who tolerates this, while a wise man just ignores or nexts it.

Indeed, it is all about control.

But I still find it fascinating the confidence level with which so many women feel they can just scoff and ridicule the anger of men in relationships overtly, while unilaterally assuming the validity and overriding importance of their own anger whenever convenient for them.

It’s seems like an added bolt-on power up of feminist triumphalism.

Even among ourselves, we men are not supposed to show such angry emotions, at risk of verbal abuse or a humiliating well-deserved fucking beat down. Us dudes are to be these rational Vulcans walking around and doing shit, deleting emotion commands from our code. Because the thought is this: allowing someone else’s behavior to determine your feelings and emotional response is regarded as a sign of male weakness.
Anger should be expressed infrequently, and when expressed, done decisively and with brevity and action.

I think a lot of dudes recovering from blue pill conditioning struggle with this immensely, and are not sure what to do when their anger and frustration is openly minimized, trivialized or negated by their wife or LTR.

In a feminine-primary social order men are expected to show exactly this emotional restraint out of fear for being considered a typical, angry bully for any marginal display of aggressiveness. Yet, men are simultaneously conditioned to be emotionally expressive, emotionally available, in order to be ‘fully actualized’ human beings. They’re taught that strength is weakness and weakness is strength, and that vulnerability and emotionalism makes them whole persons.

Then the narrative changes again as per the needs of the Feminine Imperative. Men who are agreeable and show humility are punished with a removal of women’s sexual interest in them, while more conventionally masculine men, more Alpha, potentially more aggressive men who display outward signs of it – the emotions they’re taught to repress – are more commonly rewarded with women’s sexual interests.

When you have a social structure based on a calculated duplicity and confusion of purpose is it any wonder we see a generation of frustrated Betas with a perceived potential for violence? We’re supposed to delete emotional commands, but also to be more emotionally available and in touch (whatever the fuck that means) with our emotions. What it really comes down to is men are socialized to be automatons whose emotional connection should only apply to those emotions that benefit and complement with the Feminine Imperative and repress the emotions that frighten or potentially threaten the Feminine Imperative. In other words, to become more like women is to become a more perfected ‘man’ by today’s metric.

Blank-slate Feminism

We presently live in a feminine-primary social order that wants to convince us that egalitarian equalism is the normative presumption between men and women. The blank-slate idea is that men are the functional equivalents of women, but, for all the social constructivism, men need to train, learn, be conditioned to constrain the aspects of themselves that conflict with their identities becoming more like women in their emotional nature. If boys and men can be conditioned (or medically treated) to repress every evolved aspect of their maleness that conflicts with aligning with the feminine they can be trained to be ostensibly more ‘equal’ beings. In this mindset, for a man to become more ‘equal’ he must be more feminine.

The normative belief is that boys and men are simply unperfected women, but the subtext to this is that men and women, binary genders, are (or ought to be) functional equivalents. This too is based on the (I believe flawed) Jungian theory of anima and animus; that no matter the sex, every ‘person’ has some counterbalancing elements of male and female nature to them. I believe this is a flawed theory for the simple fact that men and women have never been functional equals from an evolutionary standpoint and modern science is disproving Jung’s (often metaphysical) presumptions with neurological and hormonal (and the functional behaviors that derive from either sex’s innate structures) understanding that didn’t exist in Jung’s time.

I’ve dug into why I have a problem with Jung in the past, but the point I’m making is that, in Jung, the Feminine Imperative and 2nd and 3rd wave feminist agendas have had an incestuous affair with his theories and conflating overwhelmingly disproven blank-slate equalism. This conflation of flawed theory has been the foundation for normalizing the social feminization of boys and men for almost a century now.

With this equalist presumption as a point of origin, the first step is to condition boys for emotional control.

State Control

Emotions have an evolutionary purpose in men and women. We can trace the manifested behaviors of emotional response to survival-specific functions. Oxytocin, for instance, predisposes human beings to feelings of trust and nurturing which primarily affects women most. The effects of testosterone, which men produce 12-17 times the amount that women do, are well known and masculinize the human body. These are just some basic hormonal differences, but the function behind the effects of those hormones (as well as men and women neurological structure) is where we run into conflict with the Feminine Imperative.

For millennia, boys and men have been taught to control their emotive states. This practice in control isn’t something that sprang up a few hundred years ago, we’re talking ancient cultures teaching their young men to resist losing their rational state-control over to an emotionalism that had a potential to get a man into some serious trouble. In some respects this self-control has been a necessary part of men’s upbringing, but also because men and women experience emotional states differently as a result of evolved biological differences. Women tend to process negative emotions differently than men. This processing isn’t due to some socially constructed acculturation, it is the result of the differences in men and women’s mental firmware. This is also a primary reason why making an emotional impact on a woman, positive or negative, is a source of stimulation for them. Men’s arousal may be founded on visual cues, but women are wired for emotional cues.

Likewise, men’s emotive states run a different gamut than that of women. As I mentioned in the Anger Bias essay, men are less predisposed to emotional states that women believe are beneficial in their own experience. In a feminine-correct social state, where women’s experiences define the norm, and in a social constructivist perspective, this amounts to a ‘repression’ of emotions. The idea is that an overly masculine acculturation of boys leads them to holding back the emotions that women tend to build their lives around. The real truth is that men process emotions, and prioritize the expression of those emotions, much more as a result of our own mental firmware than social repression.

That’s not to say there isn’t some social influence over teaching men to learn self-control over those emotions. As I just mentioned, young men have been taught for millennia to have state control by each other, their mentors and their peers, but since the time of the sexual revolution and the rise of a feminine primary social order this state control has been turned into a net negative.

So, in a sense, young men of the last 4-5 generations are caught between pleasing two masters. To be considered the ‘equal’ that feminine-primary egalitarianism would have them be they must first get in touch with their emotions. However, the only emotions they are taught are valid are those that make them more alike and identifying with women; nurturing, crying, expressing vulnerability, etc., essentially anything not characteristic of conventional masculinity. This of course has the effect of women subconsciously perceiving them as they would other women, and not potential intimates. Essentially, this aligning with women’s experience of emotion desexualizes men.

Yet, on the other hand, men are expected to repress their emotions in terms of having a state control that appeals to women’s Hypergamous need for security. Thus, the emotions that might better serve men in a survivalist utility are exactly those which feminine-correct society considers negative or ‘toxic’ and therefore must be controlled. The problem inherent in all of this is that it is feminine-primacy that is defining what men’s experience of emotion is acceptable despite it being the cause of so much of women’s frustration with men.

As the saying goes, women get the men they deserve and the emotive, masculine-confused men of today are simply the result of a social order that’s standardized the female experience as the definition of what blank-slate equalism should be for both sexes – but really as a means of social control for women whose experience is defined by an unsolvable need for certain security.

None of this is to say men ought not to express themselves emotionally or avoid being artists and poets or whatever in favor of some uninspired stoicism, but it is to say that Red Pill aware men should also be aware of the feminine-primary influences informing their expectations of expressing any or no emotion. That may seem like a drawn out way of saying ‘own your emotions’, but it’s my belief that for men to reclaim conventional masculinity it will require them to honestly assess why and how they choose to express or control their emotional states based on their own definition of what is correct from a male perspective, not the female perspective.

The Power of Emotion

boxitup

Science fiction has always sought to portray human emotion as a weakness to be overcome.
Some have gone further to express the notion of our physical being as a limiting factor. This is notably seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m aware this is fiction, but I just want to reinforce the point from my earlier post that we don’t have to be held to eternal hostage by nature. We can strive to be better.
A quote from Terminator 2, sums it up admirably.

T-800 to John Connor: “I now know why you cry. But it is something, I can never do.”

While emotions are a part of our experience as human beings, Red Pill aware men need to understand the functionality of emotional responses. Rationality is, of course, the charter of this blog and my books, and while I make my best efforts to approach each aspect of what I write from as objective an origin as I’m able to, I also understand that there are limitations to remaining completely objective. I’m human like anyone else reading this (chatbots excepted) and I’ve always been fully aware that my emotional state, my own ego-investments and biases, as well as the observer effect are all something I need to make a conscious effort to account for while I’m writing about a new idea or observation I’m connecting dots with.

In a few prior posts I’ve made an effort to account for a balance between rationality and emotionalism. I say “emotionalism” because I think there needs to be a separation between the physical experience of emotion and the significance our fem-centric social order would have us place on those experiences. There is a difference between emotional response (evolved stimulus-response adaptations) and the ideologies that elevate human emotion to a metaphysical state (emotionalism).

Seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, panic and play are what are commonly recognized as primal emotions. I didn’t make this list up myself, these are just the most base-level imperatives from which more complex experiences of emotion are distilled. All of these root-level emotional experiences have been studied extensively and can be stimulated chemically and neurologically today. An easy example of this biological connection to emotional experience can be triggered and observed in the ‘roid rages’ experienced by the users of anabolic steroids.

Have you ever been “Hangry“? The feeling of anger / aggressiveness due to being overly hungry is an evolutionary survival adaptation. You’re far more motivated to kill and eat something if the feeling of hunger, prompted by its chemical triggers, also stimulates feelings of aggression. In today’s era that aggression may be inconvenient or anti-social, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors found it both acceptable and useful.

There are dozens of other examples I can give for the connection between our environmental, physical and chemical conditions and our emotional state. Similarly, there are chemical (dopamine) and behavioral prompts we associate with a particular emotional state. I don’t imagine this is anything revelatory to most Red Pill aware readers, but reviewing the objective aspects of emotion is necessary in order to separate it from the social influence of emotionalism.

Testosterone is well known to stimulate feelings of aggression and sexual arousal, but did you know that the chemical make up of testosterone is actually an inhibitor of the chemicals that prompt sadness and crying? When considered in this respect and the fact that human males produce 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone females do, is it any coincidence that men may feel less compulsion to cry over things? Yet, men are shamed for “holding back” tears. This is an example of the connection between our physical experience of emotions and the importance to which our social order places on (primarily female) emotionalism. There are a lot of complexities that make up our emotional state and the more we study the influences of our own biologies the better we can make a connection between the evolved, survival-beneficial, effect these emotions elicit in us.

The nuts and bolts science of emotions demystifies the more magical, romanticized association we like to apply to them. And at the risk of prompting any kind of nihilism, it’s important that we consider our emotional state in terms of the concrete physical stimulus that’s provoking our emotional states. It’s easy to get into the science of emotions when we’re trying to solve a problem like clinical depression and the feelings and potential behaviors it evokes, but it’s much harder to look at upsetting an elated feeling of happiness. If it ain’t broke there’s no reason to think about fixing it.

But what sets us off about really coming to terms with the science of emotion is it tends to kill our gods. Up until advent of our understanding the cause and effect influences of emotion we’ve applied a lot of metaphysical importance to our emotions. Historically, our emotions have inspired us to create some of the greatest cultural and artistic masterpieces, and they’ve urged us to some pretty ugly atrocities too. Even today, western cultures raise emotion to a mythical grandeur. We romanticize and apply great significance to how we feel. We prioritize expressing emotions to being some enlightened state and the repression or control of them as some kind of horrible evil or some form of retardation.

Emotionalism

The Washington Post (I know, I know,…) recently published the findings of a study outlining how “sexist” men have psychological problems:

Researchers then identified 11 norms considered to be “traditionally masculine” — desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status — and looked to see whether they were associated with particular mental health outcomes.

In general, the men who stuck more strongly to these norms were more likely to experience problems such as depression, stress, body image issues, substance abuse and negative social functioning. They were also less likely to turn to counseling to help deal with those problems. The effect was particularly strong for men who emphasized playboy behavior, power over women and self-reliance.

As you might expect, what’s defined as “toxic” masculinity today is decided by people invested in a mindset that confirms the Feminine Imperative. This article follows along with what will likely be the Trump-era narrative for masculinity – anything remotely considered “traditionally” masculine will be conflated with a psychological disorder. The cure to which is, of course, ego-investing men in feminine-primary mental states; effectively feminizing men.

If we look at the norms identified by this study we are expected to nod in agreement about the negative, potentially damaging, connotations these traditionally masculine aspects imply. But they are only negative because the objective environment we are supposed to interpret them from is one of feminine primacy. Anything that can be considered an impediment to female societal control, any aspect of men’s intrinsic natures that lessens the same potentials of women is considered “toxic”.

Desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status – by orders of degree these are the foundational aspects of masculinity that’s been responsible for the advancement of humanity for millennia now. I’m not entirely sure what ‘playboy lifestyle’ entails, but consider the problems these aspects of male nature evolved to solve for men. Each one of these characteristics has a functional prompt; they didn’t evolve in a vacuum. These parts of masculinity were and are functional benefits to men. Only in a society that defines supremacism of women and the primacy of female-correctness do these aspects become negative.

I doubt it will come as any surprise to the Red Pill aware that all of these traits used to have a higher social value in virtually all social orders prior to our present one. It’s not enough to make female social interaction the preeminent one, masculinity and its conventional aspects must be pathologized. They must become a sickness if gynocentrism is to sustain itself.

I’m exploring this here because the female way of socialization is founded upon emotionalism. I think it’s important for Red Pill men to understand that the defining of what particular emotional states are acceptable is intimately linked to what those states mean to the Feminine Imperative. In the past 60 years western(ized) culture has become one in which the feminine defines the predominant cultural narrative with regard to intersexual communication, correctness and the psychological values we are meant to infer from it. This discourse is one that is primarily informed by women’s high priority on an investment in emotionalism.

In past essays I’ve outlined how men and women’s brains are neurologically wired for different, yet complementary functions. Women experience negative emotions differently from men. The male brain evolved to seek out sex before food. And while our feminine-centric social order insists that, in the name of equalism, boys should be forced to learn in the same modality as that of girls, the science shows that boys brains are rudimentarily wired to learn differently.

“Greater emotional reactivity in women may explain many things, such as their being twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders compared to men,” Mendrek added, who is also an associate professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychiatry.

Yet for all of these very evident physical differences in men and women’s experience of emotion, it is women’s experience, and a feminine priority for the ‘correctness’ of that experience we apply to men. I would suggest that much of this is primarily due to women’s innate solipsism, but we’ve normalized women’s experience of emotion as the common and correct one in terms of intersexual communication and social dynamics.

Emotionalism and the applying of metaphysical meaning to the feminine-correct experience of them has pervaded our social consciousness since the time of the sexual revolution. This elevated importance of emotion has been a part of popular culture for millennia of course, but until the rise of a socially mandated importance of female Hypergamy we haven’t had female emotionalism direct the course of society as it has for over sixty years now.

As such, we see that men “getting in touch with their feminine sides” is really a concerted effort to repress their natural experience of emotion as a male, and to attempt to force their own emotional states into ones females can identify with. As I mentioned above, there are literally biological limitations for a man to experience emotion as a woman as well as his impulse to want to prioritize those feelings as women do. The presumption is that a man is emotionally stunted if he feel that repressing his emotions is what he ought to do. “Boys don’t cry” is a sickness when it is women’s experience and importance of emotionalism that drives our social discourse.

Women bemoan men’s stereotypical lack of “emotional availability”, and we put a religious importance upon our capacity to express our emotions in some way, but all of this is constrained to the box that is women’s correct experience and importance of emotion. This is not what men’s brains are naturally wired for, and in a Red Pill context this is not what women’s hindbrains want from men.

It’s important for Red Pill men to understand that our feminine-primary social order is founded up the importance women place on the God of emotion. Part of your Blue Pill conditioning was to convince you, as a young boy, that the way women emote and the importance they put on emotion is what you needed to accept as the healthy, normal way of experiencing and expressing it. The truth is you are not wired to experience emotion as a woman will. That isn’t to suggest you deny or repress your feelings, but to understand that you shouldn’t feel bad for not feeling as a woman feels. This kind of goes back to the point I was making in Empathy; while it may be possible for a woman to sympathize with your feelings, she will never be able to empathize with them as a man would experience it.

Furthermore, it should be part of men’s unplugging to come to terms with the metaphysical importance women place on (largely their own) emotional states. They remove the functional aspect of emotion and elevate it to something only women have a unique sensitivity to understand. Separating yourself from this self-induced, self-applied belief in emotion can be a very powerful tool for a Red Pill man in his dealing with women – and not just the ones he’s intimately involved with. Separating your ego from the religion of emotion and coming to terms with the science of emotion is a very difficult step for Blue Pill invested men to make. As I said, it’s like killing your gods, but it’s also killing the notion of the emotionalism you think you need to identify with in order to connect with a woman.